Islamic finance struggles toward mainstream in Azerbaijan

The government’s fear of political Islam forced banks to conduct “guerrilla Islamic finance” in which sharia-compliant deals were hidden under the appearance of conventional banking, says Fuad Aliyev, a scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Washington DC.
Now several banks in Azerbaijan openly offer a limited range of services based on Islamic principles including bans on interest and pure monetary speculation. The country’s largest bank, majority-owned by the state, has opened an “Islamic window” providing finance to small companies………………………………………..Full Article: Source